What if Permaculture was Taught in Schools Everywhere?

What if there was a curriculum series for all children and young adults to learn permaculture?

What if it was the holistic context for all the other courses they took in school?

Imagine living in an urban area where you pay for your trash to be taken away – this is actually common; imagine returning home from 3rd grade with a bag of oyster mushroom inoculated substrate in a little baggy to mix with your household paper and cardboard waste, to turn it into mushrooms and spent substrate, and then, using worms mixed with kitchen scraps, into compost for the balcony or community garden. Imagine what it would be like to end that cost for your family & to turn it into rich soil for growing food in the garden.

It would be like magic. You’d probably want to grow up to be a mycologist. If you also recognized it as sequestering carbon and fighting climate change, you’d likely, as any 3rd grader would, want to help setup the rest of your extended family with the same advantageous system which would in turn be even more empowering. Imagine if we gave this opportunity to all children right now in the world, what kind of generation of people would that create?

When I took Geoff Lawton’s online permaculture design course (’14), I instantly wanted to share all the information I was receiving with my family but had nothing tailored to them. Since I was a full time teacher with a masters degree in education writing curriculum daily at a charter school, I felt obligated, so with Geoff’s encouragement and promise to look it over before I went public, I started writing The Permaculture Student 1 textbook and workbook. I wrote it to be readable by everyone from middle school on up.

Following a successful Kickstarter, the set began traveling the world. Schools, families, and humanitarian aid organizations all began using the book set, and we are getting new orders to new places daily. Translations are being made into dozens of languages with Polish already available and Spanish, Italian, & French soon to be ready as well. Educators, administrators, families, PDC instructors, & communities are all seeking regenerative solutions and educational materials for children & young adults. To respond to this demand, I even made an online course designed to give kids a holistic introduction to permaculture with seed to table cooking, seed saving, permaculture design, critical thinking, coloring, plant profiles, worksheets, activities, challenges, and projects designed for families, schools, and all-ages.

The Permaculture Student 2 builds on both the books set and the course; it’s a comprehensive, current, and peer-reviewed permaculture textbook with a full year of content. Estimated at 250-350 pages in length, it will feature full color photos, graphic organizers, and illustrations by Wayne Fleming. It translates and updates much of Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. As Bill alludes to in several places in the book, information was incomplete and pending in several areas of permaculture research. One of those areas was Soils: Dr. Elaine Ingham’s work with the food soil web has flipped much of what we know about soil, compost tea, compost, & pH on its head. Dr. Elaine Ingham is a peer-reviewer for this textbook.

Peter McCoy’s Radical Mycology has greatly expanded the role of fungi in permaculture, and he is also a peer-reviewer as is rocket mass heater expert and educator Erica Wisner. In fact, the team for the first volume was over 500 people. It was the only way to make sure that it would be accepted broadly enough to be worthwhile to be translated into so many languages. It’s truly been a team effort with me synthesizing and organizing information, so that it is easy, fun, & empowering to read & learn from.

I feel privileged to be taught one on one by and to work with folks like Rowe Morrow, Elaine Ingham, Danial Lawton, Neal Spackman, Geoff Lawton, Erica Wisner, Joseph Simcox, & many others. I can’t wait to share all the collected and organized information I have for young adults everywhere to start living holistic, regenerative lives today, to feel empowered by every decision & objective!